Mladen Stilinović: 1+2 ≡ (2015) [English/Spanish]

Catalogue for an exhibition held from 5 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 at MUAC in Mexico City. The show comprising work dating from the 1970s up to the first decade of the 21st century included video, painting, collage, documentation of actions and installations, and aimed to demonstrate how Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016) questioned the aesthetic and social legacy of the avant-garde.

“His work comprises exercises that are frequently tautological, with citations that range from the aesthetic of the street to that of the Russian avant-garde, but always based on a dual axis that combines the formal simplicity with the deconstructive power of the absurd. The practice of this Croatian artist is governed by a specific question: ‘how to manipulate that which manipulates you’. Though he is considered a conceptual artist, the work of Stilinović is never cold nor rational, but moves in a register of humor and irony whose simple gestures appeal to the emotions and produce experiences that insist on personal responsibility. All his artistic strategies, starting with his auctioning off the color red, exchanging the definition of all the words in the dictionary for the word pain, or selling self-censorship, are connected—in the artist’s own words—with respecting the anarchy in himself and proposes the absurd as an antidote to ideology—whichever ideology is waiting for us around the next corner.”

Contains three texts by Mladen Stilinović, an interview by Branka Stipančić, essays by Alejandra Labastida and Boris Groys, and reproductions of selected works.

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2015
Folio MUAC series, 35
ISBN 607025175X, 9786070251757
95 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)

Hito Steyerl: Circulacionismo. Circulationism (2014) [English/Spanish]

“Using video installations and reflection in essays, Hito Steyerl presents a critical apparatus for analyzing the way in which the images produced by television, cinema and contemporary art are inscribed in a visual and economic regime. These are produced, circulated, distributed and consumed in a framework of audiovisual capitalism and form part of different institutional mechanisms of the art world, including the museum. From this perspective, the images are converted into a vehicle of social relations with an ambivalent status insofar as they are both commodity and means of political statement. A second problem raised by the artist is the truth condition of images. Her work repeatedly makes use of appropriated or poor-quality images, together with documentary-type elements, with the aim of questioning the relationship between documentary, reality and representation.”

This book contains Steyerl’s essays “Too much world: Is the Internet dead?” and “Theodore W. Adorno. Timeline”, and the essay “Weather for Liquidity” by Brian Kuan Wood.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hito Steyerl: Circulationism held from 27 September 2014 – 1 March 2015 at MUAC in Mexico City which brought together three of her recent works: Adorno’s Grey (2012), Museum as Battlefield (2012) and Liquidity Inc. (2014).

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2014
Folio MUAC series, 23
ISBN 6070257545, 9786070257544
71 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)

Jorge Ribalta: Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia (2008) [CA, ES, EN]

“This guide has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia (2008-09) that analyses the idea of a document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a number of debates about the genre during the 20th century. With the aim of assessing various hypotheses about the meanings and mechanisms of the documentary, it traces a historical itinerary that gets under way with the beginning of the hegemony of photography in the illustrated press in the first third of the 20th century, before arriving at the purported crisis of photographic realism in the digital era at the end of the century. For all that, the exhibition is not a history of the genre, nor does it exhaust its possible definitions, but instead attempts to study how the photographic document has been constituted — in a consistently ambivalent and polemical way — in certain historical contexts. ”

Publisher Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, 2008
ISBN 9788489771703
99 pages
via MACBA

Exhibition reviews: Max Andrews (Frieze 2009), David Evans (Photography & Culture 2010), Art Tattler (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

Arxiu universal (Catalan, 2008, PDFs)
Archivio universal (Spanish, 2008, PDFs)
Universal Archive (English, 2008, PDF, 3 MB)